Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology: The Baggage of Vivacity

“Christ almighty. Cancel the order.”

“What?”

“Cancel the cremation!”

“Stop yelling. Hope said it was okay, we have it in

writing!” And I ran to get the note from Mr. Plotsky, but

the visual of Mr. Plotsky’s helter-skelter craziness made

things worse.

“Frances, what have you involved us in?”

“She said we have a biological imperative! She said

we have to clear the decks!”

“What’s coming in for a landing? A UFO?”

--From Chap. 4 of Cooperative Village, “A Dunking A Day Keeps the Torturer Away”

In my novel Cooperative Village, I created a fictional character to represent the part of me who lags behind, who gleefully dances for perverts, who openly weeps at beauty and loss; the slowest bubble to the surface, I called her “the lovely retarded woman.” In one of my favorite scenes (one that anticipates the configuration aspect of Bogost's Tiny Ontology concept) the protagonist, Frances, rewards the lovely retarded woman for her help with a tedious project creating vocabulary flashcards for her husband's elementary school students. She presents her with an expansive gift removed from a curio cabinet of treasures—a kaleidoscope.

I showed her how to aim it a light source, look through the hole and manipulate the wheels, both in the same direction, in opposite directions, fast, slow, and spinning with abandon.

“Beautiful,” she said. “Beautiful. BEAUTIFUL. For me?”

“For you.”

She put her arms up in a “v” for victory.

The lovely retarded woman leaves her encounter with Frances refreshed, enriched, with victory in hand. (You'll have to read the book to see the curious effect their session together has on Frances.)

I don't have a kaleidoscope for philosopher, game designer, professor of Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and author of Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost; anyway, it would be too rudimentary a tool for the operation at hand. There are certain things I sensed in reading and rereading this newest addition to OOO theory that his own book wishes to tell him, certain contradictions currently withdrawn from his perception that it wishes him to resolve in favor of freedom and greater ontological dignity. In the book's epigraph, Bogost posed a series of questions to his book.

Particle man, particle man
Doing the things a particle can
What's he like? It's not important
Particle man

Is he a dot, or is he a speck?
When he's underwater does he get wet?
Or does the water get him instead?
Nobody knows, Particle man

--They Might Be Giants, Particle Man

His book has answered him, but I don't think he's listening. The book didn't know he was being merely clever, and his book wants his attention. So as improbable as this all seems, it called out to me here in St. Francois County over Memorial Day weekend. For days now I've been worrying how to intervene, how to help? (Lives are at stake.) What medium would best deliver his book's message, most impress him with his book's urgent warnings? 

So even though it was painstaking and time consuming (and way more than he would ever do for me if the tables were turned) I made him an ontograph, or the beginnings of one (I ran out of Time and didn't get to finish in the “dense meanwhile,” so it's a WIP; besides it's better if he finishes it himself). I mean it to be an amalgam of a Latour litany and a Shore picture. As Bogost writes, “The Latour litany gathers disparate things together like a strong gravitational field. But the Shore ontograph takes things already gathered and explodes then into their tiny, separate, but contiguous universes.”

My ontograph is in the form of an index, a creative supplement (some new categories, some new entries to existing ones) to the one already created for Alien Phenomenology, offered with two hopes: 1) that it fulfills itself definitionally, index as that which “leads an observer to surmise a particular fact or draw a particular conclusion.” (From Webster's Third New International Dictionary); and 2) that as John Barth told us in Chimera: “The key to the treasure is the treasure.” Tittle and all!

Here are the index categories:

New Unit! addiction: alcohol-caused liver disease, 20; when I don't tweet, I might lose face, 76;

New Unit! Christianity: wounds of the mountain-Christ, 3; rapturous disappearance of humanity, 8; a great cathedral, 21; Carpentry, 85-111; Wonder, 113-134.

New Unit! Empire (hyperobject): U.S. Armed Forces, 1; Trinity Site, 1: 1862 Battle of Glorieta Pass, 1; Roswell Army Air Field, 1; Very Large Array antenna, 2; African elephant, 9; Harry Potter, keynote speeches, single malt-scotch, 12; volcano's network, 21; the palace of being, 21; Winnie the Pooh, 22; Slurpee, 23; who does the counting?, 27; pragmatic speculative realism, 29; the Voyager, 32; Offra of Mercia, 35; the Prussian empire, the Zionists, 39; the relationship of accumulation, 40; Coke Is It!, 44; Disney Concert Hall, 46; the latest gadgets, 48; subjects are subordinate, 48; Hostess Twinkie, 62; USSR, 66;

games: Being human the players can try to outwit one another in order to fool the interlocutor through deception, 14; the cancer that beats others at its own game, 39;

perception: of things, 27; ordering like an imperative, 27; bracketing our natural assumptions about, 32; arrested before, 50; as clear subject for phenomenological inquiry, 61; as ideative categorical intuition, 80; subjective universe of one object's, 83;

New Unit! prison: of your own devising, 3; dank halls of the mind's, 5; tragically blind to the distinction between doing and saying, 15; making things tidy, 15; of representation, 40; of human experience, 65; the pace of Twitter, 76;

I thought it might be further illuminating and fun to practice a little mereology. First, consider each these six categories individually, then as a whole, and then insert each entry into its proper place in the preexisting index and consider the larger whole. For instance, addiction would be inserted between Adams, Ansel and Adventure; Christianity between children: career goals for and Coke Is It (slogan); Empire (hyperobject) between Eames, Charles and Ray: Powers of Ten and entities, alliances among; and prison would nestle between preservation of units and process philosophy.

Then just sit back with a kick-ass cocktail and let the index perform the philosophical work. It's powerful! 

I think if Ian Bogost will do this and spend more time listening to his book (and maybe literally reading it aloud will help him), one of the things he will discern (and by no means is it the most important contradiction, but it's the one that jumped out at me, and showed itself as a symptom of a broader tendency) is a fundamental contradiction between calling literature out, as he does on page farty, for having "a preference for traditional narrative" [of precisely the sort insisted upon by James Wood] because it "acts as a correlationist amplifier,” and reifying Wood's self-serving status as arbiter of the "good" and "aesthetically successful." Even the lovely retarded woman wasn't that self-defeating.

Meanwhile, although we haven't used the term "correlationist amplifier," to describe James Wood, or Adam Kirsch, or Lev Grossman, or Laura Miller, or any of the other middlebrow gatekeepers, we in the litblogosphere, and most especially Edmond Caldwell at Contra James Wood and The Chagall Position and in his phenomenal new novel Human Wishes/Enemy Combatant, have been saying exactly that for years.

Loft and Turf

For me, Elkin, while an odd bird, is incantatory. Like me, he's a New York/Missouri hybrid, and also like me, or me like him, he's absolutely hunky-dory with over-the-top. This, in pregnant parentheses, no less, from Stanley Elkin's 1991 novel (his late period)―The MacGuffin:

(“What's this all about?” Loft, the director of the airport, had asked. “A little slogan I thought up,” Druff said. “What? A slogan?” 'Change planes in our town and we'll show you a time'?” “Sure,” Druff told him, “if they had even a two-or three-hour layover we could pick them up in buses and show them around. No city in America has thought of this yet.” “There's such a thing as turf, Druff. You're the street man here. You of all people ought to know that.” So [Druff] took his case over Loft's head. “Look,” he'd argued to a chilly City Council, “what's the worst that can happen? That the bus has an accident and everyone in it is killed or maimed. Don't worry, it won't happen, we'll use only the most seasoned drivers. It won't happen, but even if, God forbid, it does, most of these people are covered by the credit cards they use to purchase their airplane tickets, by their travel agencies, by the bus company itself. I asked counsel to look into this and he assures me we're in the clear.” Going at his job in those mercantile rooms of yore as if City Hall were still a department store. He was a good old City Commissioner of Streets and only wanted to be a better one. Why not? Streets were roads, roads were what the Romans built, and he, Druff, was road man here, Imperial Commissioner of the Way to the Empire! So give me a little credit please, he'd thought. I understand about empire, why wouldn't I know about turf?)  

Photos by Steve Hull

This past First Friday I traveled a recently resurfaced country road―Highway OO―to one of the more interesting, candid and boundary-extending conversations I've experienced this year in Missouri. One almost hesitates to tell the truth about what happened for fear that some premise will be found to blow the candle out. Fredericktown is one of many small towns around here already undermined and gutted by empire and left to rot or cannibalize themselves. It’s a place where a tacit bargain's been struck: as long as the social security, welfare, unemployment, and other government assistance checks still trickle down, many people will remain fiercely and willfully ignorant, blaming “muslims” or “illegal aliens” for their own sure and steady downward spiral into the void where the center, the one that's most assuredly not holding, used to be.

But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, The Loft is a pocket of tolerance, or a pothole of tolerance on the otherwise smoothed over road to extinction, in a place where a strict and punishing conformism is fiercely policed by volunteer bullies patrolling the local coffee shop, and law enforcement personnel cruising the desolate roads. One man I know tells of being routinely beaten as a boy for the crime of riding a skateboard, and decades later he’s still in the trenches. So one has to risk that which one has to risk.

Having listened to the definitions and etymology of loft we read aloud (some surprises there), after reading and discussing Richard Jones' poem The Loft, noting its theme of lies of omission, after reading selections from chapters 2 and 3 of Cooperative Village in which the protagonist is out touring the streets of her neighborhood accompanied by the corpse of her dead neighbor on a luggage cart, “showing her a time” as Mr. Elkin says, we talked to each other about the possibilities for the future. I heard someone say that we in America live in a culture of disrespect, and that that can change. I heard someone say that she urges parents to pick up their crying babies in the aisles of Walmart and that American children don't spend enough time embraced in loving arms. I heard someone express a fear that many people don't know basic survival skills―how to plant a seed, or fix a home-cooked meal. And in the course of the forthright conversation, a 14 year-old girl, a brilliant and serious girl who aspires to be a neuroscientist, declared herself as an atheist.

What happened next was truly marvelous. No one demanded to know who's been deceiving her. No one thumped a bible or screeched scripture about Satan into her angelic face. There was a moment of profound silence, some of it pained to be sure because believers were among us (one man told me the next day that he had gone blank when she said it, that he had to leave the room he was so hurt for her), but the rush to condemnation was stayed. And soon after someone said that maybe The Loft could save Fredericktown.

We talked about confronting the absentee-landlords and cycling the art currently exhibited in The Loft into the many empty storefronts on street level. One painter volunteered to have her piece, an oversized color-saturated landscape of pinnacles, moved to a vacant shop window. It was a hallelujah moment, like the fine artists were just waiting for the literary artist to replenish their vocabulary of hope and daring. One is giddy at the prospect of the bullies stopping and staring at the unlofted art, unleashing their ridicule at objects they can plainly see to be beautiful, well-formed, shaped with intelligence and care, until finally, they get it out of their systems.And then...?

Silent Night, Every Night

“...souls though dumb may not be kept apart.” --Don Quixote, Cervantes

 I first encountered Norman Thomas, named for the free-thinking six-time socialist presidential candidate, at a Trivia Night fund-raising evening held on behalf of the Bonne Terre Missouri Historical Society at Heritage Hall last winter. My team had had an impressively precocious start, leading in first place for the first three out of ten rounds, but we finished with a decidedly sub-par performance, somewhere around (below) the 65 percentile of correct answers. The Quiet Man was one that we blew, and we just seemed to lose steam after that. My bad for not knowing that Ned Kelly was a notorious criminal in Australia, but I did supply the correct answer—Leon Trotsky—to the question, What Russian revolutionary was assassinated via a pick axe to the skull in Mexico? After which all heads at my table turned as one in my direction for answers to subsequent questions on Marx and Lenin, both of which I slam-dunked—revolutionary Socialism was decidedly in the Bonne Terrean air.

My novel Cooperative Village was one of the silent auction items, and at the game's intermission Norman stopped by my table to warmly shake hands and say a melodious and welcoming hiya to a “local author.” An impassioned Dickens lover with a soaring IQ and an easy, breezy smile, a retired counselor with Iowa, Kansas and Missouri stamped on his personality's passport, he turned my head when he told me he was working on an adaptation of Little Dorrit to be set in gangland Los Angeles.  

Norman and I became fast writing friends, meeting at local restaurants or in each other's homes with armfuls of books and scribbled-upon notes from which we quoted to embroider our notional propositions. We'd routinely interrupt each other, heartily talk over each other, laugh and probe each other's thoughts so raucously that the owner of Mario's felt impelled to approach our table to ask in a reproving tone after Norm's wife of more than 40 years. Chastisers abound in the Bible Belt, ever generous with their stifling hints and remonstrances at the slightest crackle of intellectual eros. But we eschewed the party-poopers and, for a time, Norm—well and widely read, an informed and confident literature discussant, able to retrieve and recite from memory snatches of poetry or prose to bolster most any theme—was my literary lifeline. Until late this past summer when Norm was quite literally dumbstruck. “Massive” was the dreaded adjective attached to the infelicitous noun: massive stroke.

For the five month-period in which we were actively sharing our works-in-progress, Norman had put aside his screenplay to work with his brother John on a novel based on the lives of their parents—Ken and Rose—drawing from memory, imagination and boxes of onion-skinned sheaves of sermons their parson father had preached from his various pulpits. When Norman recovers his language-based abilities to speak, read and write, he'll present the work himself, on this blog or elsewhere, so I won't steal his thunder, but for this brief excerpt. The passage is from Chapter One, and is wholly representative of Norman's verbal facility, particularly his gift for economical description and characterization infused always with his keenly intelligent and oh-so wry, laid-back humor.

Kenneth woke in the December pre-dawn. He shivered out of the blankets' warmth and yawned in the moonlight reflected from the church windows. In the shadows he groped his way into his trousers and shirt. His slippers were a fortieth birthday gift from Mother. Sent from the May Company department store in Los Angeles, they were good steer-leather, moccasin-stitched and lined with red and black buffalo-plaid wool. “Nothing too good for my boy,” Ken muttered his mother's mantra. Pity she can't be here to watch me wear them to the basement to stoke the furnace. He shrugged into a brown wool cardigan, elbows holed, cuffs frayed. He called it his “holy sweater.”

He went down the 75-year-old plank stairs into the coal-dusty basement, opened the still-warm furnace door, unbanked the fire, shook the grate, shoveled out clinkers, and threw two shovels of coal into the furnace. He watched the new coal flicker into flame, ignited from red embers. Satisfied it would not need corncob kindling, he closed the furnace door and walked up the staircase into the kitchen. The coffee bubbled happily. Ken found a not-too-dirty mug, poured the first of his daily dozen cups and tested it with a cautious sip. “Where the hell's my Book of Discipline?” he asked himself aloud.

The time-frame for recovery from the kind of major neurological event Norman has survived is measured in years, not months. I had a fantasy that I would interview Norm even in his current aphasic speechlessness, and that he would respond to my questions with articulate vocalizations and eloquent gestures rife with meaning, and that I would be able to interpret or translate these utterances and pantomimes sufficiently to understand what else is lost and, if anything, gained when language is repressed. Does one find other pockets of grace in which to find and communicate meaning? Does one become more observant, more adept at reading sub-text and sensing or seeking the ineffable? Is intellect curtailed or does it find some other way to flourish, through listening to string quartets for instance, or some other discourse? I'd dearly like to know the words Norman would use to characterize his relationship to his own enforced silence. Norman, in your dreams are you again fluent or do you remain a silent actor? I'd like to know if speechlessness effects Norm's sense of time; specifically, has time slowed down while he works toward and waits for the new pathways he must forge inside his own brain to reach the motherlode of intelligible expression?

 In my fantasy, I tell Norm that silence can be profoundly counter-cultural in this society of constant blather. At Occupy St. Louis, some of the more stirring images were ones of protesters with dollar bills or bar codes taped over their mouths―symbolic affirmation that our right to free speech is increasingly cheapened and impoverished. I'll look forward to hearing his response to that. I bet Norman already knows the old joke about the 9-year-old presumed-mute boy who one bright morning complains to his mother about lumps in his oatmeal. "Why didn't you speak before now?!" the startled mother asks her son. To which he replies, "Until now, everything was alright."
But I know everything is not alright. I know by the two words that Norman can say, which somehow don't seem random—No and Really. There is so much that we humans do not say to each other, even though we can, even though we could. We withhold, at times, grotesquely. Is the opposite of “nothing to say and saying it” “something to say and not saying it”? Norman will have a field day with that one!

 In the new year Norman and I will be reading aloud the only Dickens he hasn't yet read, 785 pages of the comic masterwork Martin Chuzzlewit. We're in the process of working the logistics out as to where the readings will transpire. If anyone in Bonne Terre is able to tote Norm to Farmington, perhaps we could read in The Factory in the Written Word, Spoken Word booth, where others might enjoy the experience of watching me perform comical Dickens, and no doubt hearing Norman laugh, and laugh some more. Under normal circumstances I would never presume to speak for Norman. But in these abnormal ones I'm willing to venture that Norm—ever thoughtful, ever curious, ever welcoming—would also enjoy expanding our wild and wooly circle of lit-love.